Category: Javascript

In the past week I have dealt with two different needs to sort a table date column (using a custom date format) using a JS plugin jQuery Tablesorter 2.0 and Bootstrap Table. If you use custom date formats – the default sort will not always work. In my case – it was sorting the dates by month name alphabetically and not by date order. Here is how you can use both plugins to sort by date order:

Example date format: Jan 28-Jan 31 (date for this example was a span of dates – in which I wanted to sort by the starting date)

Custom date sort solution in two steps for jQuery Tablesorter and Bootstrap Table:

jQuery Tablesorter

Add data to the table header:

<th data-sorter="shortDate" data-date-format="yyyymmdd">Date</th>

Add a hidden span before your actual date in the data that then matches the format specificed above:

Ever have a page not load properly in IE 7 but it loads fine – without error – with all other browsers? After you validate all your CSS/HTML and the error or funky behavior persists…and you have made sure your doctype is correct – what can you do? Validate your JS using JS Lint.

What is JSLint?

JSLint is a JavaScript program that looks for problems in JavaScript programs. It is a code quality tool.

I just got done with some cross browser consulting (my favorite) – and one of the pages would not load properly in IE 7 due to a JS error which did not make sense to me. I loaded up the offending JS in JSLint and within a few minutes – I figured out what the issue was and how to solve it.

JSLint is invaluable if you do any work with JS – so keep the link handy! You will thank me – and JSLint.

About a year or so back Demitrious shot me over a link to something he thought looked pretty slick: jQuery TOOLS. I took a quick look but never did anything else with it because I had my old standbys in place for most of what jQuery TOOLS offered (overlays, tabs, tooltips, etc).

What does jQuery TOOLS offer?

Tabs

Tooltips

Overlays

Expose

Scrollable

Flashembed

Last week I decided to finally step out of using what I normally used (Thickbox for overlays) and try something from jQuery TOOLS. One look at their demo and I was completely sold. The overlays were slick, easy to implement and best of all – really light weight. Demo: click on the photo.

If you have any web development projects coming up or in the mix, do yourself a favor and check out the demos at jQuery TOOLS. You can accomplish a lot with a little (and have fun doing it).

If you ever wanted to do something cool (slideshow, lightbox, accordion, pagination, table sorting, drop down menus etc) – please do yourself a favor and look at jQuery and all the great jQuery plugins that are available. About a year or two ago I really liked some of the different javascript libraries (YUI, prototype, etc) but over the last several months 99% of all my projects have required some sort of functionality that made me look at and then use jQuery.

Why jQuery? Unlike some of the other libraries, jQuery is very lightweight and does not suffer from a lot of bloat. You can also find a number of well documented plugins to do just about anything. You also have a great deal of UI controls and widgets that are available by using jQuery UI. Did I mention the documentation – it is really great. The learning curve is not steep – and once you do a few smaller projects – your comfort level with jQuery will skyrocket.

So next time you decide to do something to add some extra pizazz into your web site – remember, take a look at jQuery first!

As you might have noticed – I took a week off from blogging in order to focus on something else – cleaning up Jappler.com. Over the past few months I have learned so much more about WordPress, web site optimization, and what I really used this web site for – so I decided I needed to take some time to redo this site.

From a design perspective, I decided to darken the colors quite a bit in order to remove some of the drabness of the old design. I also added a background pattern to give some depth, and also added in some new pictures in the header that represent changes/additions in my life over the last few years. I love working with greys – so I added more grey elements. I also simplified the layout and got rid of a number of image based elements to keep everything minimal.

From a UI perspective, I decided to focus on the content I have created over the past 4-5 years instead of a few static pages here and there. I moved all of the blog content into the main navigation so it is easier to find/navigate. I also used Jappler Menus in combination with the WordPress function to list all categories/sub-categories.

From a functional perspective, I started from scratch with this new version. I created a number of custom functions that make presenting content a lot easier. I dropped the YUI library and went with all jQuery based AJAX functionality. The code is leaner, faster, and easy to modify for any future needs. The comments are now using WordPress’s threaded comment functionality, and a number of other WordPress 2.7 additions. I also went through and got rid of almost 50% of my old plugins (replaced the functionality with custom functions, WordPress built in functionality – or completely removed unused plugins.

From an optimization perspective, this site uses far less javascript, CSS, and images and will load much faster than the previous site. I also increased the use of title tags, alt tags, and other easy tricks to help with search engine optimization.

All in all – this was something fun that I enjoyed and look forward to adding even more new design/functional elements in the future.

Previously – I introduced a nice way to create drop down menus using HTML (lists), Javascript (drop down), and CSS (styling of menu). I put all of this together and called it: Jappler Menus. (See previous post about Jappler Menus).

Since writing that post – I have found a better, faster, cleaner way to work with drop down menus. I had originally seen some nice menus: http://help-developer.com and decided with some changes – that would be a much nicer way to work with menus. For this – I give you Jappler Menus version 2.

There is also some additional CSS for IE 6. (See IE 6 specific CSS). You can add some conditional logic to include this for only IE 6 (See the example source above – look in the header for the conditional code.)

I recently switched from using a gallery WordPress plugin called fGallery to something that is more elegant and updated: NextGen Gallery During this transition, I found a really cool lightbox-ish plugin called Lightview Plus which is more polished than your typical lightbox plugin.

Example:

You do not have to add in extra code to get the images to show up in the lightview – it automatically takes care of everything for you.

I have been busy this week with a few really cool projects – one of them to create a widget for any site that will show the latest news items from a RSS feed – while not limiting the widget to servers with PHP. After putting that together, I had to add inline CSS to style the feed output. Everything looked great but I could not figure out how to add a :hover to an inline style…until I realized I could fake it by adding some basic javascript: onmouseover and onmouseout to change the font color.